Rants, raves (and occasionally considered opinions) on phyloinformatics, taxonomy, and biodiversity informatics. For more ranty and less considered opinions, see my Twitter feed.ISSN 2051-8188 View this blog in Magazine View.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

OpenSearch

Not a huge fan of IE, but this post on David Patten's blog nicely illustrates the ease of use of A9's OpenSearch with IE 7.

I'd previously played with OpenSearch as a quick way to integrate biodiversity sources, and put together a couple that have been registered with A9 (search for "taxonomy" and you'll find them). It's essentially adding a few tags to RSS or Atom feeds, coupled with a simple way to describe the search engine.

Perhaps it's time to play with this a little more. It would be a very simple way to open up some data.

1 comment:

I hear that Foxfire 2 will use the OpenSearch standard. Also, check out www.openSearchList.com which is a repository of searches in the OpenSearch format. It's easy enough to customize your own searches.